Independence in Verification and Validation

Abstract

Large software systems are very complex and their development may involve hundreds of man years of skilled effort with correspondingly large budgets. Add to this the rigorous constraints applied by a real time and safety critical applications and this makes for an extremely challenging verification and validation task throughout the software lifecycle. The software proportion of system costs has increased dramatically over the last decade. Good verification and validation has a crucial part to play in ensuring software project success. This paper discusses the concept of independence in the software verification and validation task and in more detail presents experiences in setting up an independent software verification group covering several large projects within GEC Avionics. As discussed below the inclusion of independent V & V methods can provide increased productivity and reliability during software development. Software will always contain errors. V & V must be about how efficient we can be in pulling out the errors. The right attitude to V & V is important. Case tools and formal methods will not solve all of the problems of developing software for large systems. V & V is here to stay and independence can help!